by Amanda Grace
Woodbury, Minnesota
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The Truth About You & Me © 2013 by Amanda Grace.
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For the kid’s table—
Bree Ogden, Gordon Warnock,
Kristin Miller-Vincent, and Vickie Motter.
Because when we’re together,
I finally feel like one of the cool kids.
Dear Bennett,
You might not read this, but maybe they will, and maybe somehow that will help you. This letter can’t help us, because there is no us, not anymore.
Just saying that makes it hard to breathe.
I hope you do find it in yourself to read this letter, right down to the very last word, because maybe if you remember the way things unfolded—if you see it all through my eyes—you won’t be able to hate me.
You never said you hated me, but I can’t help but think maybe you do, because of what I did. What I made you believe.
I had to do it, though. I had to lie because I needed you, and if you’d known the truth, you never would have set the gears in motion, wouldn’t have started something like two freight trains barreling down the tracks.
The crash was inevitable, because I wasn’t who you thought I was.
I’m still two years from being who you thought I was.
Those falsehoods and half-truths started something that ruined you, and I know you can’t forgive me, but I want you to remember me the right way, the real way it all happened, and not the ugly way they’ll try to make it sound.
So for you, for me, for them, here it is:
The truth about you and me.
That day I walked into your classroom, I was a basket case of nerves. Maybe that’s cliché, being nervous when starting a new school, but this wasn’t just any new school.
It was college.
I felt like a kid, and the sad part of it all is that according to the police, I am one. So maybe I should have just listened to my gut. If I’d acted like I felt, you would have known the truth. You would have seen it coming a mile away, and you would have just fiddled with your MacBook and not met my gaze and smiled in that way that made your warm blue eyes crinkle up.
But I didn’t act like I felt. I put my head up and my shoulders back and I walked through the door to your room. I’d been nervous before that moment, and when our eyes met, the butterflies turned to seagulls. I turned and walked to the back row so you wouldn’t see me blushing. I found a seat next to a tall, pretty girl whose exotic dark eyes seemed sultry, sexy, without her even trying.
I’ll never understand why you saw me at all, sitting next to a girl like that. I’ve spent my whole life being invisible because of girls like her. Girls who ooze the sort of sex appeal I can’t even fake in my bathroom mirror.
But maybe the real world is different. I haven’t seen enough of it to be sure. It sure seemed like it was different when we were together.
The class was Biology, but then you know that already. I guess I have to write some of this for them, too, so they know the truth. You’ll just have to forgive me for saying things you already know.
Biology I was good at. Really good at. I didn’t really enjoy it the way I enjoyed things like Wuthering Heights and Shakespeare, but it came as easy to me as brushing my teeth.
Math, too. You know I tested into Calculus, even though I’d never taken the prerequisite class? I skipped right over Pre-Cal. I think that’s why my parents trusted me so much back then. It’s easy to trust a smart girl.
Smart girls aren’t supposed to do stupid things.
That day was beautiful, the late September sun filtering through those big evergreen trees, dappling the surface of my new desk as I plunked into my seat and pulled out a brand new spiral notebook. My mom wasn’t so happy to discover that my school supplies and textbooks cost over three hundred dollars, but it’s not like we had to pay tuition. Enumclaw High School paid that as part of the Running Start program. They paid for all of my classes at Green River Community College, and all I had to do was maintain a C average. I would get college credit and high school credit at the same time.
Maybe someone has explained all that to you by now. They probably mentioned it once before, too, but maybe you didn’t pay attention, didn’t give it a second thought. I bet you do now.
As I uncapped my pretty purple pen—something that seems so immature now—you stood up from your leather desk chair and walked to the center of the room, those long legs of yours making it just a few steps.
Right away, I liked the layout of your class—the desks were assembled like a horseshoe, so you could walk right into the center, so that we were all wrapped around you when you talked, smiled, gestured with those perfect hands of yours, just rough enough to seem masculine.
“Welcome to Biology 101,” was what you said, and though there was nothing special about the words, the way you said them mattered. It was like you were telling us we were being invited into something extraordinary.
I don’t know if it was love at first sight. Do you believe in that? Love at first sight? I wish I’d asked you this weeks ago, when I had the chance. I wish I’d asked you this days ago, when we were wrapped up in one another.
I probably won’t get to ask you much of anything anymore, and maybe you wouldn’t answer my questions even if I did. Maybe you have too many of your own.
You smiled as you handed out the syllabus, as you wrote your name on the whiteboard—Mr. Cartwright—in perfect, manly-but-not-ugly handwriting. It sounded British.
You look British, you know. Your face has that l
ean and rugged look, with the faintest line of stubble even at nine a.m., and your strong nose has the slightest bump in the middle, like maybe once upon a time some old chap in a pub punched you.
I know now that’s not true, but that first day I imagined you sipping a pint of ale somewhere in the UK, wearing a sports coat with leather on the elbows. I guess that would have made more sense if you were an English professor. But you seemed worldly, and that’s the image my mind made up for you.
To me, at sixteen, even the image of you sipping a frosty mug of Budweiser at the bar just outside campus seemed exotic. The guys at my school—my high school—were more likely to be found shoving one another out of the way in front of the Coke machine at McDonald’s.
When the last syllabus slid in front of me—printed in pale green—I slipped it into my binder and then looked up again as you dimmed the lights and turned on your PowerPoint presentation.
As you had your head bent over your MacBook, the girl seated next to me leaned over. The faint smell of her perfume and hair spray washed over me.
“He’s kinda cute,” she whispered, her lips curling up in a devilish, confident sort of way.
I blushed, like she somehow knew I’d thought the same thing. “How old do you think he is?” I asked under my breath.
She studied you for a moment with her eyes narrowed, and I almost wished I hadn’t asked, because I didn’t want her watching you. I guess that’s weird, that I already felt the tiniest twinge of possessiveness, but it’s not so different from scoping out guys in the cafeteria. There’s a girl code that says you can’t go after a guy once a friend has a crush on him, and with you … it wouldn’t take much to get a crush.
“Twenty-four? Twenty-five maybe? But that seems kind of young, I guess … ”
And then you looked over at us, like you’d heard the whole thing but I know you couldn’t have. She didn’t seem to care that you’d caught us whispering, and you didn’t say anything as your eyes swept over me and made me feel warm all over. Then you looked away and walked to the front and pulled down a big white screen, and the words Cellular Composition flashed across it.
“I’m Katie,” she said, sticking her hand out. Her nails were cute—pale pink, but trimmed short.
I shook it. “Madelyn,” I said.
“Pretty.” She smiled and turned back to look at you. I wanted to tell her she was the pretty one, but I had a feeling she heard that a lot.
“Most of this unit is going to be a repeat of what you learned in high school Biology, but it’s the building blocks for what comes next, so we’ll talk about it as a refresher before we move on,” you said.
But I didn’t need a refresher. High school students take Biology as sophomores—for me, that was last year. For everyone else, it was more like three years ago.
You glanced back at the screen again and clicked that little remote in your hand, and a cell diagram popped up. And as you discussed the mitochondria and the nucleus, talking in an enthusiastic way with your hands motioning all over the place, it was poetry. Once or twice, you’d run a hand through that shaggy brown hair of yours, messing up the part so it was sort of rumpled but in a good, effortless kind of way.
You were right. Everything you talked about was familiar, and so I let myself daydream while you talked, watching your lips move but not listening to the words, and the two hours drifted by and you were closing your MacBook and I was shocked it was over so fast, that I’d gotten so lost in thought.
“Tomorrow will be our first lab day,” you said. “In 3A, across the courtyard. See you all there at nine sharp.”
Desks creaked, chairs screeched, and feet shuffled. Everyone else was halfway out the door before I even packed up my things, still blinking out of my stupor. I’d been thinking about a million things, none of them having to do with cell diagrams. Even Katie, her hips swinging, slipped out before I could say another word, her effortlessly stylish ballet flats slapping against the tiled floor.
I think it’s because I was last to leave that you noticed me. Really looked at me, a smile tugging at one side of your mouth, a look so attractive it was hard to breathe.
“Everything sounding good so far?” you asked, adjusting the silver band of your watch as I strode toward the door. I blushed for a second, thinking you meant the sound of your voice, not the curriculum, before realizing I was being silly.
“Yeah, I think I’ll manage.” I paused at the door, and a long tangled strand of my wavy, dark-blond hair slid forward, off my shoulder. For a split second, your eyes followed it down before you looked back at your computer.
You stared at the apple symbol on your closed MacBook without blinking, and I wasn’t totally sure what had just happened.
But I know now. I know you were scolding yourself for letting your eyes dip where they weren’t supposed to go.
I know, when they read this, that maybe they’ll think it means you planned everything, that you’re attracted to underage girls. But I hope they remember that this was a community college campus, and so you thought I was eighteen or nineteen, like everyone else was.
You were annoyed with yourself because of that quarter-second glance at a student, because it was unprofessional.
Not because you thought I was underage. You didn’t know.
You didn’t know.
“Great,” you said, your eyes still trained on that bitten apple. Did you think of the irony, then? That you were staring at the forbidden fruit to avoid looking at me? Because even though you thought I was eighteen, I was still forbidden. Students and professors aren’t allowed to date.
I didn’t know any of this then, not that day. I just thought you were embarrassed. But then you did glance up again, your eyes soft, warm, inviting. “I hope you enjoy my class, Miss … ?”
“Hawkins,” I said. “But you can call me Madelyn.”
“Well, in that case, you can call me Mr. Cartwright,” you joked, your lips curling just enough to show that you had one funny tooth. Your smile was a little crooked. The whole thing was so at odds with your sophisticated flair, it caught me off-guard.
I laughed, and it wasn’t a pretty laugh, either, but an ugly sort of bark of laughter, one I would cringe about for the rest of the day.
I stood a moment too long, so that it turned awkward and I realized you were waiting for me to leave, or at least ask a question. “Okay then, bye, Mr. Cartwright, see you tomorrow,” I said, finally heading out the door just as the first few students from your next class slipped into the room, bringing with them the hum of voices.
“Yes, until then,” you said.
I wanted to hear you say my name—just Madelyn, not Miss Hawkins—but that didn’t happen until the second day.
It was just past noon when I got home. That’s what was nice about Running Start—a full-time schedule was only three classes. Two of my classes were an hour long, five days a week, but Biology—my two-hour class—was only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. The rest of my friends were still sitting around at EHS, listening to the same old gossip, eating in the same old cafeteria, taking the same old classes. How could they be happy with that? How did they not feel like the ugly cinder-block walls were slowly closing in, like a coffin meant to trap them forever?
The house was empty because my parents work full time. My mom is an engineer at Boeing, and my dad is a Phys Ed teacher.
At Enumclaw High School.
He’s not the sort of teacher people like, either, which never won me any points with my classmates. Dad, if for some reason you’re reading this, I’m sorry to say that. It’s not because you’re not good at what you do. You are. You just expect a lot, and you’re not the “cool” sort of teacher that students like. Even you must know we prefer teachers who are easy and fun, not the ones who are always pushing. Pushing is what you do, though. Who you are. You push your students just like you always push me.
To be fair, you only push as hard as you know you can. You just want everyone to live up to their potential. I know that. You were right last year; Ben Phillips was lazy, and if it hadn’t been for you, pushing him at tryouts, he never would have made the football team, which is what he’d always claimed to want but never quite managed to pull off.
At one point, before high school, I took it all as a challenge. Almost a passion, really—the pursuit of perfection, the pursuit of that hug, the reward, the knowledge I’d succeeded. I thrived on the validation I got from Dad, from Mom.
And that’s why every report card of mine in the history of everdom has a glossy A next to Every Single Class. Even PE, Dad’s domain, which was nearly impossible to pull off since I inherited Mom’s athletic ability and not Dad’s.
See, the thing is, somewhere along the line I realized that I’d climbed aboard a plane and watched it take off, and all I could do was sit there with my seat belt fastened, waiting for it to land at a predetermined destination. One I wasn’t sure I wanted anymore.
At some point I decided I didn’t want to be pushed. I didn’t want to be perfect at everything, charting the exact course that leads to Harvard or MIT. Somehow I just wanted to stop completely—unbuckle my seat belt, and jump off the plane—but I wasn’t sure if had a parachute, a safe landing.
And for Mom and Dad, backup plans were a must. You couldn’t turn without a new place to go to. But the validation my mom and dad gave me for being perfect just wasn’t enough anymore. The “good job” comments, the pats on the back … they meant nothing.
That day, as I stared at the television, instead of feeling stifled and stuck, my mind spun with images of you, Bennett, smiling at me. I replayed that moment when your eyes dipped low, and even hours later, my cheeks flamed hot and I hoped with all my might that I hadn’t imagined that moment, because it made me feel … different. Alive. Desired.
At three o’clock I got off the couch and went to my room. I spread my books out on the floor, along with a few random print-outs from my classes, and then I sat down right in the middle of all of it.